By 2067 robotization will have killed the global labor force, forcing a collapse in global aggregate demand. Hopeless middle classes will refuse to birth additional population, making all this a vicious circle.

Much sooner than you may imagine Central Banks economic policies will be totally replaced by demographic policies issued by central planners.

Financial management is in its final stages and will be replaced in full by demographics management as the global priority.

That will be THE greatest change of our lifetime, and a milestone for mankind.

Hear, Hear to Herman Daly's comments. Our Finite World will not be able to support itself already into the future, let alone with any doubling of resource waste. The IMF forecasts 3.5% growth into the near future. That means a doubling of energy use in 20 years. Add to that the debt bomb and we are in for a rude awakening before long. By 2067, we will likely be back in the stone age.

"...... in 50 years, I predict that the world economy is likely (though not guaranteed) to be thriving, with global GDP growing by as much as 20% per year, and income and consumption doubling every four years or so."--Kaushik Basu
The former Chief Economist of the World Bank foresees 20% annual GDP growth. Bernie Madoff was sent to prison for a smaller Ponzi scheme than that!
This is the most growthist forecast I have seen, twice the maximum rate of the temporary Chinese expansion. But Mr Basu throws in a qualification, a slight nod to the finite physical world:
"If, as overall consumption doubles every four years, we also double the number of cars on the road or miles that jets fly, we will quickly exceed the planet’s limits. ..... The right incentives will be needed to ensure that a large share of our wealth is directed at improving health and achieving environmental sustainability."
So, 20% GDP growth will not consist of cars and jet planes, because the planet cannot take it. What about food and clothing---will they grow at 20%? And population--how fast can it grow? And if we extend the forecast for another 50 years that will mean 12.5 doublings, giving a factor of over 5,000 increase in GDP. How do we keep that from "exceeding the planet's limits"? Mr Basu says only that "the right incentives will be needed". Incentives to do what? To improve health and achieve environmental sustainability. Would health and environmental sustainability be greater in today's economy, or in one whose GDP is 5,000 larger? If the growing economy is not to displace the entire ecosystem and its life support services, then we must, as economists put it, "dematerialize GDP" , or , as I prefer to say, "angelize GDP". To subsist on "angel GDP" humans would have to become angels, free from material bodies.
I had hoped that the World Bank had improved in the 23 years since I resigned from that institution , but evidently it is still peddling the same old pyramid scam.
---Herman Daly, Emeritus Professor, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland

Pew Research report says that half of humanity survive today on about $4 a day, that's $1,460 a year. In the U.S. $122 a day or about $44,000 per year per human is the average income. About 30 times the average for the lower-earning half. If we live in advanced societies, our ecological footprint per human is also far greater. Together our humanity's footprint is 1.5 earth's annual sustainable production, today. What I see happening is crisis on one hand and greater care and concern on the other. Communication and the breakdown of isolated "superior" culture will create a creative stretching that will allow humans to solve some really big threats. The great inequality we now experience will have brakes put on it. The 15% to 20% of national "profit" put to use for the "working classes" is a joke in a way. More like 80% of the profits will go to the 80% who are in the "working classes". I think this is even too vague a way of solving the problem. Piketty, Saez and Zucman at Washington Center for Equitable Growth say that the ratio between average income of lower-earning 50% of U.S. adults to the adults in the highest 1% of earners -- ratio is 1 to 81, or $16,000 to $1.3 million. I'd like to be optimistic, I think this ratio will shrink, also the ratio 1 to 30 I mentioned will shrink. How, only God knows. I write a blog, Economics Without Greed, http://benL8.blogspot.com

When the headline caught my eye, my first thought was that of sustainability - brilliantly stated - "to create a more prosperous, equitable, and stable future." Alas, Democracy and Equity may yet shine forth. Just a Canuck thought.

The problem with your analysis is that like so many other economists you miss the essentials. Unless we change our economies away from carbon fuels over the next twenty years, which is impossible considering the people who are running the world economies, global warming, population growth, deforestation, ocean acidification (consequence of global warming) will put impossible strains on world economies which I suspect will potentially tear our societies apart. Besides the fact that resources are limited and exploitation of many of these resources has caused excessive overfishing, excessive pollution of land, rivers, lakes and oceans and the fact that humans have not been able to control their population growth except thru war, famine and disease the belief in some cheery future without a complete philosophical change in how economics interacts with nature, how human society needs to work with nature not create all kinds of externalities that all but destroy it. sounds to me both naïve and silly. When are economists going to realize that they are part of a much larger system? Personally, I believe that we have gone past some tipping points that will make changes to our physical world so dramatic that human planning will be completely insufficient. But hey, keep dreaming in nonsense and when the hard realities hit well at that point it won't matter too much.

The article by Kaushik Basu on what the world economy will look like in 50 years from now is a sound prediction if we account for the fact that mainstream commentators and economists, like Basu, are unable to conceive a world outside capitalism. That is part of their indoctrination. His prediction may well come true but I think the chances of that happening is slim because I don't think Capitalism will survive its current crisis.
But if I were to venture into a prediction like that of Basu's, with my limited knowledge and understanding, it will be in the lines of Karl Marx's prediction: the inevitable overthrow of capitalism by the proletariat. It will be replaced by the establishment of a more equal and just society with very limited private property, without wage slavery, limited or no markets and fundamentaly different state apparatus (i mean government here). Government in the future will be of a bottom up structure compared to the prevailing top down structure and the Zapatista slogan 'here people command, and government obeys' will be true for such a government. This is more of a hope than a prediction but I strongly believe that this is what future has in store for us.
Regarding the other option I'm not as optimistic as Basu. According to his prediction capitalism will survive the current crisis, if not the ongoing pain, suffering and conflict will continue. But I think that the only other option, to overthrowing capitalism and establishing an anarchist or communist or socialist society, for the future will be that of a specie marching to its extinction if we survive at all. The fundamental difference in my prediction and Basu's is because we inhabit different political spectrums.
Let me give some reasons in support of my prediction here. The State Capitalist System that have spread throughout the world in the last few centuries had reached its peak in the second half of 20th century in the form of Neoliberal Capitalist Globalization and with 2007-08 market crash it's inevitable decline has begun. The existing neoliberal capitalist system was experiencing increasing number of market crises starting at the end of last century leading up to the much larger market crisis of 2007-08 which has spread throughout the world. This has resulted in levels of pain and suffering not seen since the great depression of 30's for 99% of people and it's still going on. I see this crises as the beginning of the inevitable breakdown of capitalist system that Marx predicted.
Of course capitalism had its share of crises in the past and it had survived these crises successfully. But I think today's conditions are a little different, as Basu says the current economic crisis has simultaneously caused a political crisis of roughly the same scale around the world, especially in the West, so much so that people have started looking for alternatives.
Signs of this change are happening on the ground level in the form of worker owned factories even in US, success of left governments in latin america, movements like that of Zapatistas in Mexico who has established people's democracy with an anarchist socio-economic-political structure in its Chiapas region, resurgence of left parties in Europe like that of the latest stunning performance by Labour Party in UK under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, Arab spring, Occupy Wallstreet protests in US which introduced the narrative of capitalism as 99% against the richest 1% into mainstream discourse, environmental movements to protect nature and combat climate change, feminist and LGBTQ movements for the equality and self-determination of marginalized populations in societies and so on. Currently these movements are isolated and ignored by the mainstream media which in the existing socio-political system functions as a proxy propaganda system for neoliberal capitalism, that's why you don't hear about these movements from traditional news outlets. I think it is inevitable that as these movements will grow in size by gathering popuar support, by educating people at the grassroot level on the nature of their societies and available democratic alternatives like that of an anarchist or communist or socialist nature, these movements will converge to form a left movement that will challenge and overthrow capitalism to form a society based actually on the ideals of French Revolution - Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.
But the main reason behind my prediction is capitalism's inability to tackle the environmental crisis we are in, especially global climate change it has created. No matter how many global agreements we sign or what ever reasons its apologists give, when we live in system dedicated only to the production of capital for bourgeois class, as profits and dividends, we wont be able to stop climate change and it will eventually be a disaster for us as a specie.
So I think a revolution is coming it may not be as dramatic as Marx predicted, it may even be a slow revolution gradually dismantling capitalism and replacing it with a communist or anarchist socio-economic-political structures. But I believe it's coming, as Arundhati Roy so poetically puts it,
"Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."

"Nonetheless, Keynes’s attempt surely sets a respectable precedent for economic future gazing. So here I go: in 50 years, I predict that the world economy is likely (though not guaranteed) to be thriving, with global GDP growing by as much as 20% per year, and income and consumption doubling every four years or so. "

20% growth? Consumption (global no less) doubling every four year? This has to be a new low for P.S. And that is saying a lot...

Every time and economist mentions redistribution or programs to help the losers you know he is living in a fantasy land. The winners who own the government outright won't pay for it period. Profit sharing will happen only over the dead bodies of the poor in a failed revolt. This is pure unadulterated fantasy the author is either writing satire or not living in the same world with the rest of us.

We need to start thinking about a world with no work. It does not need to be a catastrophe, but it will be if we try to carry on the same old way.

In such a world, we would need the government to set a price on everything the automation produces, related to its resource use. Then, we need the government to distribute the income it gets from that to the people. There would be no need or justification for any inequality, because there is no need for anyone to work. This would allow the things that can be produced by automation in a limited environment to be distributed fairly.

Even today, we should be moving towards such a model. Workers are already being displaced by automation, and you ain't seen nothin' yet. Wait until truck drivers, bus drivers, and taxi drivers are displaced by self-driving vehicles - no longer a pipe dream, but a virtually certain reality. What is a pipe dream, though, is that we can just retrain all those truck drivers as scientists and app developers and go merrily on our way. We need a basic income or negative income tax scheme, financed by environmental levies, which would take care of those displaced by automation now, and which would gradually turn into the above scheme as automation progresses.

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